go was married at
nineteen--not so young in his case, for he had already taken his
doctor's degree. He told me that during the first five or six years
there were times when neither he nor his wife could mail a letter,
because they did not have enough cash to buy one postage stamp. He
laughed aloud as he recounted this, and added, "There was never one
moment when either of us regretted our marriage."

Marriage can be wonderful from every point of view when it is a
combination of the highest physical delight with the highest spiritual
development. It is indeed the sublimation of the senses. The great
novelist George Meredith, who hated priggishness in all its forms, said
in a letter: "I have written always with the perception that there is
no life but of the spirit; that the concrete is really the shadowy; yet
that the way to spiritual life lies in the complete unfolding of the
creature, not in the nipping of his passions. An outrage to Nature helps
to extinguish his light. To the flourishing of the spirit, then, through
the healthy exercise of the senses."

Could there be a better description of the union of physical and
spiritual development in marriage than his phrase "the complete
unfolding of the creature"?

To his son Meredith wrote: "Look for the truth in everything, and follow
it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout
your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding
wavers whenever you chance to doubt that He leads to good. We grow to
good as surely as the plant grows to the light. Do not lose the habit of
praying to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse than
fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul
which catches the gift it seeks."

What is love? From the age of six or seven on boys and girls fall in
love with a good many different persons. But this is not the same thing
as married love, which grows by companionship and by sharing sorrows as
well as pleasures. Many years ago a college friend of mine, a splendid
fellow with everything to make life worth living, was married to a fine
girl. He died suddenly, during the first week of the honeymoon. I said
to a man of sixty, "Can anything be more tragic than that?"

"Yes," he replied unhesitatingly, "it is more tragic when the husband or
wife dies after twenty-five years of marriage."

He was right; the loss after twenty-five years is more terrible; and in
the instanc